Black Women in White Johannesburg

Black Women in White Johannesburg: Domestic Workers' Spatial Strategies under Apartheid.

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In mid-twentieth-century South Africa, thousands of black women left rural areas to find work in the households of suburban white families. Many headed to Johannesburg, South AfricaÂ's largest city and industrial powerhouse, which was a racially and ethnically divided space.



Professor Rebecca Ginsburg, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Educational Justice Project at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will share the ways in which domestic workers responded to and overcame the severe restrictions on mobility imposed upon them by Apartheid-era legislation.



Dr. Ginsburg, who lived for several years in South Africa, teaches courses on historic African cities and the Atlantic slave trade, among other subjects.

Her current research interests include fugitive landscapes and geographies of the Atlantic slave trade. Dr. Ginsburg's previous publications include The Landscapes of North American Slavery; Historical Geography, and Landscape Journals, among other titles.




This program is a part of a series entitled Sightlines: New Perspectives on African Architecture and Urbanism.


In this series the Museum for African Art and Columbia’s Institute for African Studies have partnered to explore the social, physical and emotional contours of Africa’s many cities and changing urban environments.

The featured speakers will share about their perspectives on architecture, urban planning and architectural theory as it relates to both African contexts and larger global relevance.



Museum for African Art education programs are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, Inc.



Columbia University, International Affairs Building Room 1512, 420 West 118th Street